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Thu, 08 June 2006 09:52

Eclipse User

Originally posted by: andrew.easter.gmail.com

I have read about bundling third party libraries and understand the process. However, what about when I have commercial libraries, such as TIBCO Rendezvous, that would not permit bundling or redistribution (but are required by my application)????

Is there a way round this? How can I safely use third party libraries without bundling? Someone must have come across this before!

Andrew

Re: Third Party Libraries [message #68547 is a reply to message #68525]

Thu, 08 June 2006 13:11

Eclipse User

Originally posted by: ifedorenko.rogers.com

I had to deal with external commercial libraries in the past and found
few possible solutions to this problem

1. The simplest one is to create your own (URL)ClassLoader and load
thirdparty classes dynamically. This works well when you have
common/wellknown interface like JDBC or JNDI implemented by the library
and gets messy if no such interface exists. You have to be very careful
not to have hard (i.e. compile time) dependencies on classes coming from
the library. Also, many libraries use thread context classloader
( http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/FAQ_How_do_I_use_the_conte xt_class_loader_in_Eclipse%3F)

2. Although I have not tried this myself, it seems to be possible to
reference external JARs from MANIFEST.MF.
(https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=109743)

3. In theory you could wrap the thirdparty library in a bundle
dynamically at runtime. I had a working prototype that did this for
WebSphere but decided this approach was too complicated.

Random Access Andy wrote:
> I have read about bundling third party libraries and understand the
> process. However, what about when I have commercial libraries, such
> as TIBCO Rendezvous, that would not permit bundling or redistribution
> (but are required by my application)????
>
> Is there a way round this? How can I safely use third party libraries
> without bundling? Someone must have come across this before!
>
> Andrew

Re: Third Party Libraries [message #68554 is a reply to message #68525]

Fri, 09 June 2006 05:28

Eclipse User

Originally posted by: neil.integility.com

As Igor pointed out, there is support for references to external JARs from
the bundle manifest. Although it's not standard OSGi, this is a solution
that was developed explicitly for the situation you encounter, ie you have
a requirement to use a JAR that (for either technical or legal reasons)
cannot be bundled or moved.

I believe that the JSR 291 expert group are looking into whether and how
to standardize this mechanism.

You should be clear though that there are problems with the approach, in
particular to do with the risk of the bundle manifest getting out of sync
with the JAR. So it's something that you should only do if you really
really have to.

It might be worth asking TIBCO to provide a more OSGi-friendly
distribution. Is anybody else trying to use RV with OSGi?

- Neil

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